On Thursday, March 30th 2017, SAC’S The Biological Anthropology Research Group and the Skeletal Biology Research Centre hosted ‘Written in Bone’, a one-day symposium on Forensic Anthropology and Disaster Victim Identification (DVI). The event was free to the public.
Talks by eight experts in the field of forensic anthropology and DVI were dynamic and resulted in lively Q & As!
The symposium opened with a talk by Dr Nicholas Marquez-Grant (Cranfield University) on ‘The Role of the Forensic Anthropologist in the UK’ followed by an interesting introduction to forensic facial reconstruction by Paloma Galzi (Galzi Forensics Ltd). After a short tea break, we were introduced to ‘bacterial bioerosion of bone’ by Dr Tom Booth (Museum of London), and a look at into ‘ballistic impacts on bone’ by Kent’s own Dr Chris Shepherd.
The afternoon session saw talks by Dr Lucina Hackman (University of Dundee) on ‘ID of the Living’ and Prof. Mark Skinner (Simon Fraser University & University of York) on ‘Ethics and Casting doubt’.
The final part of the day saw an unusal exhumation case study introduced by Prof. Robert Green OBE (University of Kent), and a complete overview of UK DVI by Detective Inspector Howard Way from UK-DVI.
Feedback on the symposium was excellent – another successful SAC event!